Grrr.. the store turned over too quickly. Upon starting my adventure there was a sling (+21) in the store weaponsmith for around 1700g. I was having horrible luck collecting gold when suddenly a glutton ghost dropped 1900 adamantites (I had 152 gold on DL5 when this happened). So I recalled and the entire store's inventory was new after 2,000 turns. Usually the store is much slower in turning over. Guess I'll have to settle for an average long bow.

Edit: New game: I just picked up a staff of starlight about 10 turns on DL1 and when I activated it to see what it was I gained a character level. Does the staff of starlight give more experience because it's out of depth or do all staves upon IDing by use give the same amount of experience?

Edit: dropped 3rd magic book because nothing in it seemed very useful and too expensive for my CL and several DLs later come across a small vault with little guarding it. Except the only way I can get in is with stone to mud. Only a 5 feeling, but I don't have much gear at all, yet. There's a mage I could kill in hopes of getting the book, but he's hanging out with the p brothers, so I'm thinking I'll head for the stairs.

You know... you might want to post character progress to the ladder instead of here. It's a teeeny bit annoying to have this "pollution". Obviously, if you have questions or interesting observations, etc., do post them in the forums for visibility. It's just these "I did a thing" posts that are a bit annoying.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like there's a huge amount of traffic in these forums, but the ladder is specifically made for posting about characters and progress and such.

At one point I asked why others don't post DAR (during adventure reports). I die too much to post on the ladder; that would be quite tedious. The only reason I wasn't posting in AAR is because a lot of those threads tend to be more spoilery, and the temptation to read sensational titles is sometimes too great; and while I'm aware of 99% of the artifacts, there are still a few the details of which I'm not familiar, and many more of which the details I have forgotten. One of the big draws for me, of Angband, is the lore and mythology of it (Tolkien and all), but I am aware of my tendency for forum pollution (hence why most of my DAR posts tend to be consolidated to a few threads) but I will post my DARs over there from now on. .

On that vein, an idea that has been growing on me, that I think would extend the mystery in Angband for even those who are fully spoiled is to have new artifacts and Uniques added periodically, but have them have a chance of showing up of about 1 in a million (literally). I dunno what the One's chance is for showing up, but the devs could create new uniques/artifacts and have their chance to show up be about 40 to 200 times less likely. On the one hand that might seem like a waste of energy if no one is likely every to see the work put in by the devs; on the other; with a game like Angband that sorta lasts through the ages, where everyone is in search of great and rare treasures, the mystique that adding super rare monsters/items to the game would have, would far outweigh the fact that 99.96% of players would never encounter any of them.

If, over the years, you have enough of these ultra rare items/monsters added to the game, not only will there always be the chance of something new to discover, but the chance for die hard players to encounter at least one or two of them will go up significantly when there are 20 or more of these ultra rares added to the game.